While Howell points out that nine other states have no income tax, Widmer of the Taxpayers Foundation says this argument is misleading. Six of those states compensate with higher real-estate and sales taxes, and the other three (Nevada, Alaska and Wyoming) benefit from rich natural resources or gambling revenue.

Widmer also questions the individual benefit involved in Question 1, saying the measure would mostly benefit the wealthy.

“This is a reverse robinhood scheme,” he says. “It’s a fraud.”

Question 3

The referendum that mandated Clean Elections passed in 1998 by a more than 2-to-1 margin.

But in a recent poll by the Boston Herald, 66 percent of voters now oppose Question 3—a non-binding measure that would advise the legislature to continue public funding for political candidates.

Pam Wilmot, executive director of the government watchdog group Common Cause of Massachusetts, says the wording of the initiative is misleading—and is designed to kill the public funding measure.

Question 3 states: “Do you support taxpayer money being used to fund political campaigns for public office in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts?”

Wilmot says this wording was slanted by State House Speaker Thomas Finneran, who is one of Clean Election’s biggest opponents.

“It was put on the ballot by the state legislature as a backdoor attempt to kill the voter-approved Clean Elections law,” Wilmot says. “But it purposely...presents it in the most negative light possible.”

But Stephen Allen, campaign director of the Coalition Against Taxpayer Funded Political Campaigns, disagrees that the wording is misleading.

“Could it be worded any simpler?” he says. “I think it’s simple, it’s straightforward and it requires a straightforward answer back.”

Allen, who calls the law “welfare for politicians,” says funding Clean Elections takes money away from vital state services and calls Clean Elections advocates overly optimistic about the law’s potential to reform the campaign finance system.

But Wilmot says opponents of the law cast Clean Elections in an entirely negative light.

She says that Massachusetts ranks 49th out of the 50 states in competitive elections—three-quarters of incumbents run without a challenger.

Allen counters that 45 of the 48 states that are more competitive than Massachusetts operate without public-funding laws.

The one Democrat who ran as a Clean Elections candidate this year—Warren E. Tolman—was soundly defeated in the party primary. But Wilmot says Clean Elections is not about any one candidate but about holding politicians accountable by forcing them to debate the issues.

—Staff writer Christopher M. Loomis can be reached at cloomis@fas.harvard.edu